Live data from Hacker News

Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

reason.com

531–540 of 1001 posts

Re: Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

#531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that postmodernism, or at least your definition of it, is so much nonsense (in the realm of hard sciences, at least - soft science unfortunately does suffer from human contextual bias issues). I don't read SciAm (maybe that's an issue), but I'm a bit suspicious that this could be a political hit piece. That being said, if any of the claims in the article are true (e.g. calling statistic normal distribution cu…

Postmodernism has a bit of relevance for hard sciences, because relativity is known to be counterintuitive, and as a consequence theories will have absolutist bias. Consider Roger Penrose's Andromeda argument, where he tries to reason about synchronism in the context of special theory of relativity, but ends up assuming Galilean absolute synchronism, because Lorentz synchronism is counterintuitive.

Bad interpretations of data or theories are always a possibility, however that's only relevant to the interpretation.

Unless the data itself is fabricated, i.e. unscientific, the hard sciences are "hard" because they don't suffer from these flaws of interpretation (as much). There of course issues with observability, replicability, however these are issues that can be dealt largely without invoking any societal biases, aka through the scientific method.

Rejecting the scientific method completely because humans are involved at any step, is a form of absurd-ism, yes, we are not perfect, but our methods are a lot better than a) nothing b) your choice to reject hard science because it doesn't match your personal belief (hard bias).

Re: Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

#532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to live my way outside of superficial constructs like gender. I do not want to be forced to accommodate people who think that gender identity is something relevant. The current political climate sucks for agender people.

I want to live my life outside of superficial constructs like religions. I do not want to be forced to accommodate people who believe religion is relevant. The current political climate is challenging for areligious people. I don't get to have this opinion because conservatives are censoring me and are always shoving religion down my throat. Imitating conservative argument style is fun, you get to tell how you feel b…

I think you are being sarcastic but i actually agree with that.

Re: Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

#533
post #407

The Reason article blurs the distinction between SciAm's opinion pieces and its factual (or putatively factual) reporting. That's disconcerting. "Opinion piece" objectively means "free bullshit zone". Reason is usually much more responsible than this. SciAm has of course fallen into terrible disrepair. But that happened long ago and the cause wasn't BS in the editorials. Who even reads editorials in a science magazin…

> blurs the distinction between SciAm's opinion pieces and its factual (or putatively factual) reporting.

To me, based on the content and context, the main quote written by the departing editor the article cited was clearly an opinion (or editor's column) piece and not part of SciAm's science reporting.

While this article didn't focus on it, the biggest factor when the editor-in-charge of a publication is biased isn't what is written but rather what never appears at all. An editor's curation and broad editorial guidance is subtle day-to-day yet has enormous impact over time. I've read accounts of newsroom reporters talking about editorial bias and it's remarkable how each individual biased decision is almost undetectable and, in fact, in some cases the biased editor may not even realize their bias is cumulatively shifting coverage.

Re: Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

#534

I'm sorry, but reason magazine has personally made my life difficult by participating in medical gaslighting. There may be something to some of this, but I'm not inclined to trust them at face value.

Is there any particular basis for this statement, or do you prefer to leave it unsubstantiated?

Re: Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

#535

Science has _always_ been political. On the front page a few days ago was the story of a bunch of physicists bitching at each other over what happened in WWI I have a book from Scientific American from the 1960s that has a whole section removed for the british audience because it contained instructions on how to run experiments on bears. That is a political act. But, seeing as how administrations of various colours h…

>I have a book from Scientific American from the 1960s that has a whole section removed for the british audience because it contained instructions on how to run experiments on bears. That is a political act. I think you'd need a bit more evidence for that being "political". A far more plausible reason for the removal is that Britain doesn't have bears to any degree (there have been isolated sightings but most think t…

Galileo. Oppenheimer.

I think those two examples are already enough to show that science has been political for 400 years.

Re: Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

#536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to live my life outside of superficial constructs like religions. I do not want to be forced to accommodate people who believe religion is relevant. The current political climate is challenging for areligious people. I don't get to have this opinion because conservatives are censoring me and are always shoving religion down my throat. Imitating conservative argument style is fun, you get to tell how you feel b…

I think you are being sarcastic but i actually agree with that.

I'm being sarcastic but also agree.

Re: Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

#537

People double down as part of human psychology. Some grasp their own biases much better than others. We should try to train people to be more self reflective and less biased politically. It does not correlate with education level so something is clearly broken in higher ed..

I sense this has to do with personality, namely high conscientiousness and low neuroticism. That’s not something that can be taught.

Re: Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

#539
post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the argument the poster is making is as root cause analysis. The root cause of the messenger failing was the missing nail. Sure it could have been many other things, but in this case it was the nail. And if it was a pitched battle that was narrowly lost by one message, sure, they could have won or lost because of a dozen other factors, but in this case it was the missing message. There are likely many other i…

This is a very well thought-out comment. I commend you for it. Sometimes the problem really is tiny. Ill look for the link, but I read an article about how Valve, the company, was saved by an intern. I think details matter.

See https://80.lv/articles/valve-steam-the-entire-pc-gaming-indu...

Re: Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

#540
post #407

The Reason article blurs the distinction between SciAm's opinion pieces and its factual (or putatively factual) reporting. That's disconcerting. "Opinion piece" objectively means "free bullshit zone". Reason is usually much more responsible than this. SciAm has of course fallen into terrible disrepair. But that happened long ago and the cause wasn't BS in the editorials. Who even reads editorials in a science magazin…

I've seen some of their science articles veer into political assertions.
Post reply on HN